Thank you for the links, Dr. Inboden. Please consider checking them next time, to ensure that they work as intended, before posting (yes, I managed to find the intended URLs buried inside the hyperlinks you included).

Alas, you sully your otherwise reasonable post, however, with your reference to Mr. Abrams. After lauding Bush, Abrams says (in the piece you link to): “and that the Obama administration's abandonment of this mind-set [focus on democracy] is nothing short of a tragedy.”

This is absurd. What has Obama abandoned, really Dr. Inboden, other than one of Bush’s noted democratization strategies: the ten-year trillion-dollar US invasion?

Bush’s bona fides as a supporter of the values he claimed in the 2003 speech is of course suspect, the timing coming as it did on the heels of the Iraq invasion, amid the waning days of the WMD hunt, and after Sistani forced the US to capitulate on a constitutional referendum and early partial power transfer. Moreover, the specific point that Bush makes in the quote is, I believe, fundamentally dishonest. Bush would like listeners to take away the notion that our lack of focus on democracy in Iraq eventually led to a threat to US security. In essence, that al-Qaeda threats – including 9/11 – justified our belated attention to democracy in Iraq. This is a point that Bush tried to spread many times and in many ways during this period, of course, and it is seriously misleading.

All in all, Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech matches up just fine with Bush’s 2003 speech on this count. If we’re giving credit for noble aspirations in speeches, there is no good reason for such a one-sided take on it.

In any case, Mr. Abrams is of course a pretty poor candidate for the democracy-promotion role that you bestow on him via your citation. Consider, for example, his alleged involvement in the Venezuelan coup (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/apr/21/usa.venezuela). Such gratuitous nods to the architects of the Iraq invasion ultimately serve to detract from your posts, Dr. Inboden, rather than enhance them.

Dr. Inboden,

Here is a working link to Abrams' article http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/28/AR2011012803144.html

This article must be Elliot Abrams' idea of a joke. The US gave billions of $ in aid to these corrupt/totalitarian governments and Bush had the audacity to call for freedom. Orwellian to the max. Abrams calls Mubarak a crony, yeah, he was our crony.

Also, Republicans have a tendency to take credit for things they have nothing to do with. For example, Reagan's "tear down this Wall" speech happened more than two years before the Wall actually came down. In 2003, Bush calls for freedom in the Middle East and 7 years later the people rise up. It's like a rooster saying becasue I crow, the sun comes up.

Abrams can stop sucking up to his former boss. I've had some pretty rotten bosses in the past, but none that were responsible for the death of thousands of US troops and an untold number of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. How can he continue to support Bush? Abrams also gives a shout out to another criminal-in-chief boss in Reagan (violating the constitution, anyone?) One thing you can say for Republicans is that they have blind allegiance to authority and a great selective memory.

Also, Abrams' article is another example of irrational escalation of commitment and a sort of hindsight bias on the part of Abrams.

I am interested to read this story which, taken at face value, implies that foreign policy began on 12:00 PM on January 20th, 2009. What did the Bush administration do about this situation? What kind of contingency plans did they have in place? If Egypt has been tottering for as long as the author implies, they should have had such things, right?

From a disinterested observer I would be happy to ignore this, but for someone who very recently worked in this exact field, I would like to know what they did about the problem they now say they saw coming.

I, too, wonder at the propriety of citing as a source of foreign policy wisdom Elliott Abrams, who has let his country down so many times during the course of his long career.

Once again I have to note the evident inability of posters on this blog to move past the temptation to cast discussions of policy matters in the domestic political context. They are personally loyal to former President Bush, and understand as well that at this point the Republican Party doesn't contain a strong base of support for conducting foreign and national security affairs differently than Bush did. So sentiment and personal self-interest align to discourage the posters here from failing to demonstrate their fealty to the last Republican President on a regular basis.

Even so, denouncing the Obama administration's failure to make good on the Bush administration's big, empty talk about Egyptian democracy as a national strategy is, well, a little obvious. President Obama, it is true, faces a different situation in the region than did Bush: the American position is much weaker, thanks in no small measure to Bush having been President for eight years. As I have observed elsewhere, the Obama administration has also displayed limited flexibility in responding to events, particularly those involving domestic unrest in countries with unpopular governments friendly to the United States. Obama still has to manage American interests in the region, not the future of Egypt itself. To this point his administration has done so responsibly.

I do agree that a major development like the unrest in Egypt might have been foreseen and prepared for, though former officials of an administration that got itself blindsided by two insurgencies in southwest Asian countries occupied by American forces are not the people who should be making this criticism. And, in perfect fairness to Obama, there seem to be an awful lot of Egyptians who are as surprised at the events unfolding in their country over the last week as anyone.